I urge you to look on the rest of the maps while you're at it. Take a gander were most pre-Incan cities were located as well. You'll soon find why "generally" was a poorly chosen word which no cherrypicked examples will change.

Whats your alternative theory?

So here is a map of the valley of Mexico, before Lake Texcoco was drained. As you can see, there are flat areas, especially along the lakeshore, but the valley is lined with hills and there are even hills between major population centers. This isn't to say there are no flat areas, but elevation is a major concern for any significant travel distance.

Here is a map of the Incan Empire. Notice the terrain between major population centers like Cuzco and La Paz or Lima? Again, there are places where a wheeled cart would have helped, but overall the land is quite mountainous.

What historical figure should I compare Rudolph to at the end of the song, Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer?

As a previous comment stated, Stalin was in power years before Hitler. It is hard to measure how "evil" they were and comparing them is pretty useless. Both of them committed horrendous acts of genocide. Stalin was in power before Hitler so Stalin had a head start, so to speak, on his evil acts. By the 1930's, just as Hitler was gaining significant power, Stalin himself was ordering the mass execution civilians based on ethnic justifications. Stalin's policies lead to massive famine throughout the Soviet Union even before WWII.

Saying they were "not equal due to their beliefs and background" is misguided at best and very harmful at worst. Both Stalin and Hitler were selfish, paranoid men. They were much more worried about their legacy than the well-being of their peoples. Their genocidal acts exemplify that they both were evil men. Genocide is genocide, there is no "nice" way of commiting it. Neither them believed in individual freedom and both of them show that they held true hatred in their hearts.

To answer your initial question, Stalin was a violent tyrant who came before Hitler, who was also a violent tyrant, so Hitler was a second Stalin. Both of them rose to power though violent political suppression. Even before WWII Stalin's atrocities and political suppression were well known. When the academia and politicians noticed that Hitler was doing many of the same things Stalin was, like killing political adversaries, it was fitting to call Hitler a second Stalin.

Thank you!

Draft animals aren’t a necessity to make the wheel useful for transportation. If anything it’d make weaker animals more useful, and wheeled carts being drawn by humans have existed in Europe and Asia for centuries, if not millennia.

The need for tight turning ability in cities would have made the wheel a welcome addition in mesomerica, and the reduced workload going up inclines with wheels is superior to non-wheeled.

They didn’t understand germ theory, I’ve read about their baths, they’d use one tub of water and they’d all blow their nose in it and spit in there before the next guy used it

It was a few factors, in addition to Stalin being in power for more than over a decade prior and the higher death count, Stalin also had first cultivated a cult of personality, purged not only critics but allies too, and though Stalin did it in the name of communism's idea of atheism, Stalin and Hitler were both personally antisemitic and targetted Jews. They both targetted Catholics and other religious and ethnic groups for example Slavs for Hitler and Ukrainians for Stalin, both targeted Gypsyies just to name 2 groups. And although Stalin did allow for the Russian Orthodox Church to start operating again openly in Russia during WWII and to continue (Stalin prior to joining Lenin's communist group had been a seminarian and was training to be an Orthodox Church Priest) because it was his religion and he allowed for a worship of it because it was sanctioned by him, while Hitler was building a religion that was based on his vision that would be sanctioned by him. The OSS (the CIAs predecessor) had a lot of knowledge on these men that was shared between themselves and the British and they saw little difference between Stalin and Hitler. Also some at that time actually considered Stalin worse and that working with him after Hitler turned on Stalin in Barbarossa as a kind of a deal with the Devil.

>Both areas are generally mountainous

No, they're not. A lot of lowlands, plains and broad valleys and many cities were built by the coasts (especially far away from any mountains in the case of Peru).

What are the origins of foot fetishes? To clarify when was this phenomenon first recorded or examined in a case study? Top of my mind is Krafft-Ebing's 'Psychopathia Sexualis'.

If by bathing you mean "fulling immersing yourself in water", then yes, most people would only bathe once a week. Keep in mind that most people did not have running water in their homes until around the mid-19th century so taking a full bath in the past often meant have to haul multiple buckets of water.

That being said, though, it was very common to take sort of sponge baths everyday by washing the face, hands, feet, armpits, and genitals. (I did that recently when our pipes got filled with resin from a malfunctioning water softener and I found that I stayed surprisingly clean even without taking a full shower.) Also, it's important to remember that handwashing before meals was a must throughout pre-modern Asia and Europe.

The real problem was not so much lack of bathing as a difficulty keeping water clean. That had also been a problem in the ancient Roman public baths; the water in them was not chlorinated like modern swimming pools are, which meant so rather than preventing disease, they seem to have been very likely to given visitors internal parasites.

That’s my understanding too. I think metal infantry armor must have been more expensive than a sword. And I read somewhere that around 1000 a basic sword was a typical item a peasant might own. I figure then it must have been affordable enough for a big empire.

There's two* main areas in the Americas that had dense urban cultures, Mesoamerica and Peru. Both areas are generally mountainous, with sharp changes in elevation, where wheels wouldn't be bery useful. In addition, Mesoamerica didn't have any large domesticated animals to pull carts, and Peru had llamas, which are fairly dainty and weak. Between the lack of draft animals and the steep terrain, there just wasn't a good use for the wheel.

*there was also the Mississppians, but we don't know a lot about their culture. One can imagine the lack of draft animals was an issue, even if the terrain was flatter.

To what extent did ancient Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, and Norse believe their own myths? Did Norse people literally believe the world was made up of the body parts of a dead giant, and get ticked off if people said otherwise like young earth creationists these days? Or did they recognize it as a story

>Southern American natives

I'm not sure they had ships but for trade the Inca Empire had a well documented set of very efficient roads.

Did the Central/Southern American natives have some kind of ships that could travel long distances and carry plenty of goods? It seems to me they never really traveled far, yet they somehow still had access to sooo many resources.

Wouldn't they also have been affected by the extreme anti-religious trend of the revolutionaries? I don't know much of American history but I've always had the impression the founding fathers were (at least mostly) Christians.

Hmmmm I didn’t know this.. thank you

Who else put up not only concentration camps, not only labor camps (where people worked to death), but also death camps? Who else, not merely satisfied with these, tried to maximize the hell out of the system to produce as many deaths and as much suffering as possible?

>Hitler was here first

He was? Stalin became General Secretary of the Communist Party in 1922, 11 years before Hitler became Chancellor.

I think the Nazis mastery of propaganda and mass marketing assisted greatly. Nazis wanted to brag about themselves to anyone and everyone they could, making all kinds of stylized films and creating an image of aryan perfection. That isn’t to say Soviets weren’t proficient at propaganda or didn’t make attractive art… as a matter of fact Soviet art can be quite beautiful and modern. But the brand image of “Look how strong and beautiful our pure blooded people are. Don’t you wish you could be just like us?” is more alluring than “Class solidarity” or oddly homerotic paintings of Slavs and Chinese men embracing

Tell me which other poster boy unleashed a world war and decided that genocide was best done in an industrialized fashion? Yes, we have many examples of equally depraved behaviour and wild cruelty by dictators, but few of those unleashed a war that would engulf the world.

Not really, bath houses were still quite popular in the medieval era, including with ahum, company. It's onlyby the 16th century that the pendulum began to swing in the other direction.

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